Page 92 of Forbidden Protector

"I know why you came." My voice comes out rougher than I mean it to. "That's not what I asked."

Her jaw sets. "There was also a threat assessment." Her hands stay flat on the table, open, nothing hidden in them. "Before I ever requested the posting, before I knew anything about this county beyond that supplement, the Bureau ran its own ugly architecture on the families here. Proximity assets. Leverage potential. The whole apparatus they build before they send anybody anywhere."

"And you read it?"

"Once." She doesn't look away. "I put it away under the things I'd have to live with if the case ever needed it, and then I forgot it existed, because by the time I got off that plane the only thing I was thinking about was a dead man's handwriting, not a stranger's paperwork."

"Was I on it?"

"Holt."

"Answer the question."

"Yes." One word, no cushion around it. "You were on it. Above your father, if that's the part you're circling. I found out in a briefing I sat through four months before I ever laid eyes on you, and I have thought about that memo maybe twice since, both times to be grateful it turned out to mean nothing at all."

"It's not nothing. It's the reason you got on the plane."

"It's four months and one entire life out of date." Her voice climbs. Not with anger, with something closer to panic. A woman watching the ground do a thing she can't argue with because it isn't a fact she's fighting. "I didn't come here to use you. I came here for a dead man in a photograph in my father's drawer, and you happened to be waiting at the curb when I landed. Everything since has had nothing to do with a column on a page I haven't opened since February."

I hear every word. I believe every word. That's the part she doesn't understand yet, standing there with her hands open and her face doing everything right. This was never going to be about whether she lied.

"I know you didn't use me." My voice has gone somewhere flat and even I don't recognize from the inside of it. "That's not what I'm doing right now."

"Then what are you doing?"

"Math." I look at her, and I don't bother hiding what's left of me, which isn't much. Not after what I just stood in that hallway and heard.

"My father built me out of usefulness. Said it himself. Knox got the ranch and the name on the gate. I got the use. I've spent three weeks telling myself I got free of it the night he disowned me in that study. This morning I stood outside that same room and heard exactly what I was to somebody else's file before you ever laid eyes on me. A name on a ranking sheet. A leverage asset with a number attached. There's only one way to run that math, Tatum. You didn't do anything wrong. The file already knew what I was before either of us had a say in it."

"That's not fair. Not to either of us."

"No." I say it quiet, no fight left in it, nothing left to argue with because I'm not arguing. "It isn't. I'm not angry. I want you to hear that part, because I don't think you're going to believe it in about thirty seconds, and I need it said while it's still true."

I feel the last of something in my chest go still. Not break. Worse than break. A door closing so gently it doesn't even complain about the hinge. "I just heard it in the right room for once."

She comes around the table fast, reaching for my arm, and I let her get there and I don't reach back.

"Holt, look at me. This isn't the same as your father. I never once treated you like a⁠—"

"I know you didn't." And I do know it. Some far-off part of me is still capable of knowing true things even with the rest of me gone quiet. "Doesn't change what I heard, or where I heard it, or what it turns out I've always been to everybody who's ever had a reason to want something from this family. You included, whether you meant it that way or not."

Her mouth opens and doesn't use itself. Not because she's failed to explain it right. Because I'm not disputing her explanation.

I'm somewhere past the reach of explanations altogether, standing in a kitchen I built with my own hands, doing calculations my father taught me before I was old enough to know I was learning them.

I go to the door. She doesn't follow.

Then Gus comes off the floor.

Not the low sound this time. All the way up, a full bark cracking the quiet in half, nose slammed against the front window glass hard enough to fog it, every hair on his back standing straight up.

Out past the corral, thin and high and wrong, a sound tears through the dark that no horse makes for weather.

Trane.

I kill the lamp and the kitchen lights with my good hand before either of us has said another word, and the house drops into black. I stand there in the dark with a woman I just walked away from and a scream still hanging in the air outside.

"Company," I say.